


I see the truth

by unhappy_matt



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Canon-Typical Existentialism, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Introspection, Mortality, Suicidal Thoughts, Trauma, canon-typical multiverse, stoner Summer Smith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:06:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27178972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unhappy_matt/pseuds/unhappy_matt
Summary: Late at night, Morty and Summer share a conversation on the roof.
Relationships: Morty Smith & Summer Smith
Comments: 8
Kudos: 33





	I see the truth

**Author's Note:**

> To my sister from a different dimension, a very belated birthday present.  
> I'm happy we got to know each other in this universe. Thank you.

It’s long past his bedtime when he climbs up to the rooftop, but Morty can’t sleep.

In the morning he’ll say he’s sick, if anyone even bothers questioning him; and maybe he’ll be able to catch up on some sleep, and he won’t have to show up to take a History quiz he hasn’t studied for. He’s falling behind in several of his classes and his grades are plummeting. Again.

The neighborhood is quiet. The night sky is black, a limitless expanse, high above him.

Gazing at the moon no longer brings Morty any joy, but it’s easier to see the stars, recently, since two of the street lamps nearby stopped working and nobody ever came to replace them.

He stops in his tracks, just as he’s about to hop over the highest part of the roof and settle down in his usual spot.

Summer is already there.

She’s sitting cross-legged, turning away from him. The silver light hits her ponytail, casting a glittering halo around her hair. She’s surrounded by puffs of pale pink smoke.

Resting next to her, a glass object that resembles a bong, from what Morty can tell. It’s full of a neon pink liquid. 

He’s trying to figure out a way of alerting her to his presence without startling her, when Summer turns around abruptly. It almost causes Morty’s fingers to slip, momentarily losing their grip on the tiles.

Summer yanks out her earphones and huffs.

“Morty!” With quick gestures she starts coiling the lime green cord around her fingers. “Don’t sneak up on me like that, dum-dum.”

She throws something at him, which he manages to duck. There’s a plastic bowl next to her, holding a small mountain of fluffy popcorn.

Morty rolls his eyes, lifting up his leg to slide by her side.

“You-you’re the one who’s in my spot, Summer.”

“Yeah?” She lifts her hand to poke his forehead.

“Too bad. It’s my spot now.”

Morty grumbles in protest, fixing his ruffled hair. He lets his feet dangle from the edge of the roof. “Whatever,” he sighs.

Watching her up close, his sister’s eyes are red and puffy. There’s a smell around her that he doesn’t recognize; it’s pungent and toasted, similar to weed but not quite. Some extraterrestrial variation, he assumes.

The thing she is using to smoke out of does look like a bong, and it’s—ugh, _dragon-shaped_. It’s a transparent sculpture of a dragon curled up on a rock. The pink liquid is contained inside the core of the dragon’s body, like some kind of weird alien blood. Summer sips from the dragon’s open mouth, where a small metal straw is visible between its glass teeth, and she puffs out little clouds of that pink vapor.

Summer follows Morty’s gaze. She offers him the bong.

“Want a hit?”

Morty grimaces, pulling away. The smell is prickling his nose. He doesn’t find regular Earth weed to smell that great, either.

“I’m-I’m good, thanks.”

“Lame.” She shrugs, pulling her arm back and taking another puff. “More for me, then.”

She looks away, gazing ahead. Morty steals a handful of popcorn.

For a while, they sit around like that. They eat in silence and watch the sky. Nothing much to see, not from there; but there’s peace. There’s quiet. Morty’s life rarely knows either of those things.

Summer doesn’t put her earphones back on, although for a while she says nothing to him, doesn’t even look at him. She sits there, rocking gently back and forth, as if pushed around by the breeze, and fishes popcorn out of the bowl. She gathers them in her palm and picks them up one by one, rolling them around with her fingertip to decide which one to eat first.

There’s something achingly nostalgic about that childish eating habit, something that Morty recognizes from foggy memories of the Summer he knew before. _This_ Summer has that same tic, and this knowledge is like a crack on the sidewalk, like an ancient wound reopening.

A new tidal wave of memories swims through his head. They have little to do with the present, no reason to why they came to him, all of a sudden.

A swirl of faded colors and distorted sounds, fragments of voices and words. They’re fuzzy, dreamlike, more visual than verbal—he must have been very little.

He and Summer, the Summer from his original world. Beams of sunlight creeping through the blinds, drawing golden parallel lines on their bedroom floor. The dust visible in the light would hypnotize him for hours.

Summer used to make a pillow fort out of their bed. They would lie there, facing each other, and she would read him stories. Her voice was bright but soothing, comforting. She would get upset when he started to doze out, pinching his arms to keep him awake.

_Mommy, mommy, I’m teaching Morty to read._

Summer had a lisp. Summer with a missing front tooth and a neat bob of red hair and a light blue hair band. Summer would guide his chubby hand along the pages, pointing his finger. _See, that’s a giraffe. G-i-r-a-f-f-e. And that’s an elephant, like your stuffed animal._

Morty licks his fingers, tasting salt on his skin. Suddenly he’s craving Martian Melted Fudge Popcorn. Next time they should get those, it’s the superior flavor. He’ll tell Summer.

It could be their next adventure, Morty thinks lazily, carried by the sugary scent of Summer’s space weed. The next trip for their brother and sister team: kicking ass and getting space popcorn.

The smoky smell surrounds them, wrapped around them almost like a blanket. If Summer likes it because it’s comforting, he can see why.

Morty’s never tried space weed, or regular weed, for that matter. He wonders which type of weed goes better with which type of popcorn.

“Hey. Morty.”

Summer shifts, putting her left foot on the opposite knee.

Morty straightens his back, propping his chin on one hand.

“Hm?”

“What was it like?”

Morty frowns. He’s sure the conversation in Summer’s own head must have been interesting, but she must have missed the part where she’s supposed to tell _him_ what she’s talking about.

“What?”

There’s an intensity that materializes on her face, all at once. A remote sadness, and all of a sudden she looks so much like Beth.

“Burying yourself. What did it feel like?”

A shiver runs underneath Morty’s skin, even though the night is warm.

_Well, what the fuck, Summer._

He stalls, frozen. He looks down at the bowl of popcorn between them, now empty.

“It felt… like…”

The words won’t come out, caught behind Morty’s teeth.

He stares ahead, past the edge of the roof, letting his gaze embrace the grass below them.

His eyes find the shallow graves, the small mounds of soil where he and Rick’s alternate selves continue to rot away into nothing, like everything in the universe eventually does.

It would be easy to fall off that roof. One foot slipping at the wrong moment; one bad day too many, when the only real solution he has ever found for those is to keep going, until each individual one melts into an unrecognizable blob along with all the others. 

Killing himself would be easy. _Dying_ is easy. Everything dies; what doesn’t, probably wishes it could.

Infinite other versions of himself could take his place, the same way he usurped the life of his dead self.

( _It’s not stealing if you steal from a dead guy_ , Rick would say.)

Or maybe there would just be a dimension without a Morty, like there must be infinite others.

Morty closes his eyes.

He breathes out, slow and shaky.

He lies down. The tiles are hard and cool against his back. The stars are so many places he could go, so many other lives that other versions of him are living.

He rolls onto his side, tucking his hands under his cheek, mirroring Summer’s position. A roof is not quite like a pillow fort, he thinks, but it’s close enough.

He returns Summer’s gaze. She’s staring at him, a small wrinkle in the middle of her forehead, between her brows. He still hasn’t answered.

“It’s—it’s difficult to explain.”

His voice breaks.

There’s so much poetic bullshit he could say to sugarcoat it, and nothing would come close to capturing the _feeling_ of that day.

His own ruined body. The blood all over the walls.

The ground under his nails, after, that smell on the palms of his hands. It wouldn’t come off. He would wash and scrub himself, again and again, and he could still smell it. Rick kept telling him it was all in his head, but Rick was caught up in a drunken stupor half of the time, and they were already busy on new adventures, no time to think.

The garage was fixed. Rick made him help clean everything up, so what does it matter?

A room is just a room.

“Like survival,” Morty murmurs, at last.

His eyes are burning. It must be Summer’s smoke.

“I-I still have dreams about it, sometimes, y’know.”

It feels like admitting some kind of defeat.

Summer winces.

“You never told me.”

The noose lodged around Morty’s throat comes undone. The dam breaks, and if he doesn’t speak now, he never will.

So, he tells her.

How for weeks on end, after, he kept waking up in the middle of the night, with the sheets of a bed that didn’t quite belong to him glued to his body, coming back from dreams of being buried alive.

How he would wake up, night after night, to go stand at his window, peeking through the blinds, compelled by the hallucinatory echo of his dead self calling to him.

“Oh.”

His sister’s chin trembles. Her eyes flicker over his face.

“Wow. _Shit_ , Morty.”

He laughs. He can’t help it.

“Yeah.” _Shit_ is a way to put it.

She lifts her arm. This time, her hand cups his shoulder. And it’s solid, it’s real, because _this_ Summer is here, because this is the sister he has.

The family he didn’t leave behind.

She sits up. He follows.

There are tears in her eyes. Summer sniffles.

“I’m happy you made it here.”

She shoves him lightly, tapping him on the shoulder with her knuckles.

“I’m happy I still get to have you as a brother.”

He blinks, vaguely surprised to find his own eyes are wet.

“Thanks. I’m happy I’m here, too.”

_Here_ , he gets to have a life, another shot, in a world that isn’t a post-apocalyptic wasteland of his own making. He gets to have a sister.

A sister who sits down with him to watch TV, who fights aliens with a sword and guns and a bow, a sister who embarrasses him in public with shitty pranks and steals the Invisibility Belt, a sister who has his back no matter what.

A sister who twits and dates boys and girls and listens to snake jazz and gets high. A sister who rules and who is a survivor through the worst that the universe can throw at her. A survivor, like him.

He hugs her. She hugs him back, squeezing him tightly. Catching him off guard, she traps him in a headlock. This time she’s successful in her quest to mess up his hair, rubbing her knuckles against his scalp, before he’s allowed to pull away.

“Your hair looks dumb,” she informs him, with a wobbly smile.

“Y-your face looks dumb, S-Summer.” He raises his middle finger.

She reciprocates, grinning, then bows down to take another sip from her dragon bong. He’s pretty sure he does not want to investigate where or why she got that particular souvenir.

Morty looks up.

He wonders if this Summer shares the same memories he has, or something close enough. If she knows a version of him that was almost identical, but different in a myriad of small details—the first word he learned, his favorite color, their dumb fights.

What differences exist, big and small, between this existence and the other one, up until the point where he and Rick doomed their original world, and his self from this dimension was blown to pieces that he had to scrape off the garage floor.

_“And the answer is: don’t think about it.”_

He can’t bring back the past. He can’t bring himself not to care, like Rick does or at least like he claims he does—it’s not like Rick believes half the things he says, anyway.

Moving forward is the only solution Morty’s ever found. Pretty smart, for someone so many people have called dumb.

He can ask Summer about the things she remembers. Find out watch matches, what doesn’t. Maybe they wouldn’t like everything they’d find, but that’s life, isn’t it?

He’ll ask her. Maybe. Another time.

He nudges her, elbowing her side.

“Summer?”

“Yeah?”

“I-I was thinking. One of th-these days…”

Morty hugs his knees. He smiles.

“Wanna s-steal Rick’s s-spaceship and go get _Martian Fudge_?”

**Author's Note:**

> Look, I SAID that I wanted to write something that was softer and less grimdark than what I usually write. I never said I SUCCEEDED. 
> 
> The title is taken from the opening lines of "Domestic Bliss" by Glass Animals, which I associate with Summer being protective of Morty.
> 
> \- 
> 
> Time for the serious message, for a sec.  
> If you've ever struggled with suicidal thoughts, this fic is my hug to you.


End file.
